The Hearth and the Salamander (continued)

The Hearth and the Salamander (continued)

The Hearth and the Salamander (continued)

Summary

Montag is disturbed by his meeting with Clarisse because
he is not used to talking with people about personal subjects. Upon
returning home, he realizes that he is not happy after all, and that
his appearance of happiness up to this point has been a pretense.
He continues to experience feelings of foreboding. He finds his
wife, Mildred, in bed listening to earplug radios called “Seashells,”
just as he has found her every night for the past two years. By
her bed, he accidentally kicks an empty bottle of sleeping pills
and calls the hospital just as a sonic boom from a squadron of jet
bombers shakes the house. Two cynical hospital workers arrive with
a machine that pumps Mildred’s stomach (Montag later refers
to the device as the “Snake”) and another that replaces all her
poisoned blood with fresh blood. Montag goes outside and listens
to the laughter and the voices coming from the brightly lit McClellan
house. Montag goes inside again and considers all that has happened
to him that night. He feels terribly disoriented as he takes a sleep
lozenge and dozes off.

The next day, Mildred remembers nothing about her attempted suicide
and denies it when Montag tries to tell her about it. She insists
on explaining the plot of the television parlor “family” programs
that she watches endlessly on three full-wall screens. Uninterested
in her shallow entertainments, Montag leaves for work and finds
Clarisse outside walking in the rain, catching raindrops in her mouth—she
compares the taste to wine. She rubs a dandelion under her chin
and claims that if the pollen rubs off on her, it means she is in
love. She rubs it under Montag’s chin, but no pollen rubs off, to his
embarrassment. She asks him why he chose to be a fireman and says
he is unlike the others she has met, who will not talk to her or listen
to what she says to them. He tells her to go along to her appointment
with her psychiatrist, whom the authorities force her to see due
to her supposed lack of “sociability” and her dangerous inclination
toward independent thought. After she is gone, he tilts his head
back and catches the rain in his mouth for a few moments.

Analysis

Clarisse seems older to Montag than she really
is, even older than his wife, who is fourteen years her senior.
Mildred seems childish by comparison, perhaps because very little
goes through her mind that has not been put there by the vapid television
and radio media. Technology has replaced actual human contact for
Mildred, just as it has for most of the city’s population. She refers
to the people on her interactive TV parlor walls (which have been
written with one part missing, so that the viewer can read those
lines and feel a part of the action on screen) as her “family.”
She and Montag do not sleep in the same bed, and she seems anxious
for him to leave for work in the afternoon.

When Montag comes home from work to find Mildred lying deathlike
on the bed, listening to her radio earplugs in the darkness, the
room is described as “not empty” and then “indeed empty,” because
though Mildred is physically there, her thoughts and feelings are
elsewhere. Bradbury frequently uses paradoxical phrases, describing
a character or thing as dead and alive or there and not there
at once. In Mildred’s case, this reflects her empty, half-alive condition.
Bradbury uses similar paradoxes to describe the “Snake” stomach
pump and, later, the Mechanical Hound.

Although most of the people in Montag’s world are completely uninterested
in nature, their culture abounds in animal references, such as the
mechanical objects called Snake and Hound. The only natural force
that people maintain any interest in is fire. However, even fire,
once one of the most basic of necessities of human life, has lost
its utility and is used primarily for entertainment.

We also see that Mildred’s character is more complex than
she knows. She suffers from a hidden melancholy that she refuses
to accept consciously and that causes her to commit suicide. This
same type of repressed inner pain affects much of the population
of this world, manifesting itself in self-destructive acts. Montag
feels violated by the strangers who come with their machines and
take his wife’s blood. In this section and throughout the novel,
blood is symbolic of a human being’s repressed soul or primal, instinctive
self—Montag often “feels” his most revolutionary thoughts stirring
his blood, and Mildred, who has long lost access to her primal self, remains
unchanged when her poisoned blood is replaced with fresh, mechanically
administered blood.